Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present Forma di Utilità / Shape of Utility, an exhibition of drawings by New York-based artist Sanou Oumar and sculptures and functional design by Los Angeles-based artist Matt Paweski. The exhibition is both artists’ third at Gordon Robichaux, and for Oumar, the first since he received asylum in the United States in 2025.

The exhibition’s title, Forma di Utilità / Shape of Utility, is inspired by the philosophy of artist and designer Giovanni Gariboldi, developed with Gio Ponti in Italy during the 1940s. Paweski explains,

I became obsessed with Giovanni Gariboldi last year—he was the director of Gio Ponti’s ceramics studio and later head of the Italian porcelain company, Ginori. He was also a fine artist in his own right. For Gariboldi and Ponti, [the concept of] Shape of Utility sought an austere, elegant, and simple place to develop from, while maintaining idiosyncratic details, patterns, and just-off decisions. This, coupled with cutting-edge techniques in industrial ceramics, led to the creation of oddly beautiful objects. I am not a ceramics person, but Gariboldi really got to a perfect object—in terms of scale, exacting color, and deep understanding of materials and how to manipulate them. His artistic sensibility, mixed with industrial production, aimed to give regular folks access to beauty and simplicity after the war, when there was a rethinking of history and a reinvigoration of the arts after such a dark period.

Paweski’s work evidences his deep engagement with art and design—functional and otherwise—and pits his reflexive, handmade process of drawing, cutting, bending, assembling, disassembling, painting, and riveting against industrial production and materials. Each work is created by provoking a series of mental and physical shifts, a toggling between two and three dimensions from which his forms evolve according to an intuitive logic. “The goal isn’t to try to solve an ergonomic problem,” Paweski remarks. “Points of reference and inspiration are finely distilled through the process of making so that the viewer can find many personal touchpoints but no fixed references. They’re devices for expansion, introspection, and transcendence that propose new structures, architectures, designs, and possible paths forward—new views of the world.”

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For Paweski, the potential for art and design to positively transform individual and collective experience remains as radical and relevant today as it did for Gariboldi. These seemingly utopian responses to our complex social and political reality are grounded in pragmatism, simplicity, and the intimate act of creating drawings and objects by hand, a fundamental aspect of both artists’ work.

Working primarily with colored pens, paper, and paperboard, Oumar creates highly inventive drawings using his own distinct mark-making vocabulary and his seemingly infinite capacity for invention. Through his process, he creates a space for transformation and healing.

Oumar’s intricate drawings reveal his interest in the dynamic forms and structures of architecture born out of a real yet imaginative desire for home: roots, order, and infinite calm. As a young person growing up in Burkina Faso, he would contemplate the elaborate simplicity of the modern bank building in Ouagadougou: “There was nothing missing. I could see all the lines in the building: rectangles, circles, triangles, everything included, each one following its own order.” His serialized drawing practice echoes this pursuit of visual order, a process that helps him reframe and come to terms with the chaos of his past and present experience—the trauma and constraints of his childhood, and the physical and emotional displacement he experienced as an asylum seeker in the US.

Oumar’s deftly made drawings immediately call to mind Indian mandalas, complex circular designs that represent imaginary palaces to contemplate during meditation. They also evoke the work of Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz, who used abstract geometric language to explore complex belief systems, spirituality, and mystical restorative practices. Like Kunz—the Swiss artist and healer whose diagrammatic drawings held within them the secret to health and well-being for her patients—Oumar draws to commune with other worlds and dimensions, an act that is by turns metaphysical, liberating, and restorative. “The reason I am alive is because of them.”